> I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.
It sounds like you might care though, albeit not directly. That blurriness is often the result of attempting to use fractional scaling (i.e. not an integer multiple like 200%, 300%, etc). This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. You can do fractional scaling on X11 but Wayland typically does it better, and without the blurriness.
This is why I went for 32" 2560x1440 when I got a larger monitor. Very similar pixel pitch to the 24" 1920x1080 units that I had before (one of which stands beside it in portrait, so 1080x1920). I didn't need more smoothness, just wanted more on screen without needing to make things smaller.
And I think the point was more that many of us don't care how it is fixed. If that takes a new application, so be it. If it can be done on the older one, also so be it.
Please post the output of `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE`.
I use Cinnamon as desktop because it happens to be the easiest to configure for 150% scaling. I think I've tried xfce and some others but ended up with mixed results.
I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-...
(hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")
I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...
Unfortunately KDE has gone full stupid in this regard. From the numerous bug reports, I think they decided that you can't please everyone so they should please nobody. Scroll speed is not deterministic to humans, who are not calculators. The intuitive thing is to scroll a consistent a amount per wheel tick. They used to do this but now it's a percentage of the content so sometimes it scrolls 14 lines and sometimes it scrolls 8.
I guess the behavior is different in Wayland because "x11 is dead" therefore only breaking changes make it into the x11 version. Some day they'll make the x11 version suck as bad as Wayland and then people will make the right choice. /s I'd be a bit less salty if I wasn't being asked to chose between two different sets of broken. I need LibreOffice to work so I'm using x11.
This line made me laugh! Unfortunately I do agree that that seems to be the case here also.
What in the hell..
Fixed versions from bug's whiteboard field: target:7.2.2 target:7.4.0 target:7.3.3
> (hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")
Yes. This is more or less what KDE does everywhere the upstream software stack supports it, and probably also what it already did the last time you tried it. This comes down to your distro's display server configuration.
On Xorg, mouse scroll speed is up to your X11 input driver, not your desktop environment. If the X11 input driver you're using for your mouse supports setting the scroll speed, that setting shows up in System Settings in your Plasma session. Libinput doesn't support this feature, so if you're on Xorg and you want it, don't use libinput as your mouse driver.
Under Wayland (which also uses libinput), the compositor mediates all input and so the KDE folks have worked around the issue and implemented the feature themselves.
See the upstream issue in libinput here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/74...
In KDE, I have no idea, because the last KDE that I have used was 3.5, which was the best desktop environment that I have ever used, including in comparison any Windows or MacOS version (while KDE 4.0 was the worst).
I tried it again last year some time and it was neither as configurable nor as stable as 3.5. Granted, maybe it's just rose-coloured glasses, but Trinity DE still seems to provide a better experience for me to this day.
If you use Wayland the answer is Yes. There's a "Scrolling speed" configuration in the Mouse settings.
I know it's hard to tune a good trackpad profile with such varying hardware, but it sure.would be nice to get a MacBook like smoothness on a Linux DE.
And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend.
I'm okay with fedora on my laptop, and I must say I've gotten used to Gnome. There is a tweak tool for gnome that allows for adjusting some things I think should be tweakable and discoverable by default.
> And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend.
On Linux you can get close to what Mac does. I believe what the Macbook does is it has a hybrid hibernate/suspend. Suspend, for me, only lasts 2-4 hours and then my battery dies. I think there is another suspend setting that improves this, but there is actually a hybrid suspend that will hibernate after X hours of suspend. My laptop can be closed for a week or more and still have battery.
Have you tried Wayland?
Look, I'm not an evangelist, but it solves so many annoying little problems with X11 that I never want to go back. You don't realize how much of a hacked-together, obsolete kludge that X11 is until you use an alternative.
I have tried it, in fact I just rolled out Fedora 37 w/ KDE Plasma on Wayland to my new i7 box ... but I have only used it for a few hours as it is more of a toy project than a daily dev machine.
I also use a customized layout (mostly international English with shortcuts for German Umlauts and Y and Z remapped to eachother). It definitely works in most modern Linux desktops to use a "custom keyboard layout" like described here. There are many guides which are outdated on the topic. It's a hack and also not super simple to execute (you only need to do it once) but it is persistent and system-wide in all programs at least:
You can’t easily do that because every Linux program expects different things. The hack to make it work is to switch keyboard configs when you switch the application, I think. It’s far from ideal.
I agree that vanilla GNOME just isn't good enough. But especially for Wayland, GNOME is far superior to KDE in terms of stability and glitch-freeness.
Yes, please.
AFAIK Haiku has things like copy on Alt. So you'd have to press Alt+C to copy.
Personally, I would prefer to keep the "Windows"/Super key free for OS-wide shortcuts, e.g. tap=search, hold=drag window with mouse, Super+enter=terminal, Super+h=minimize (as in GNOME), Super+w = overview (as in KDE), etc. Using Alt for that and Super for commands would also work, but is somewhat counterintuitive to me as Super has the logo of an OS on it. On the other hand it is the same key order as used by macOS.
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings:
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too:
What other application uses something else than CTRL+C for copying on Linux? Been using various Linux flavors for decades and the only application that requires a different shortcut than CTRL+C is terminals, as they already use CTRL+C for something else.
Otherwise I can't think of a single application using something else than CTRL+C.
- copy: Ctrl+Insert
- paste: Shift+Insert
- next tab: Ctrl+PgDn
- previous tab: Ctrl+PgUpWhy did it not paste?? I know I selected it, go back and select.. still nothing, ahh yes I am on windows go back ctrl+c exasperated sigh, back again, ctrl+v exasperated sigh.
X11 has it's problems but primary select/middle button paste is one thing it got right. some others are point to focus, don't raise on click, tiling window managers and the compose key.
Personally I understand the criticism of GNOME 3, but I liked it a lot more than the GNOME 40 series. I've switched to KDE Plasma around this summer, I think from GNOME 42.
> consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications
You can get fairly close to this if you use gnome or kde specific distros.
But you're generally asking: please don't be open source. Please don't have a bazaar of ideas. Please build me one big cathedral. You ask here is antithetical to the purpose of whom you are asking. On most general purpose distributions, users probably ought to end up having multiple different UI elements.
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I actually like this idea a lot, because it suggests a certain system-wide malleability layer that, at the moment, doesn't exist. Anywhere, on any system, at all. How would you go about making your Mac have consistent Windows keybindings, for example? I'd be interested to see how people thought we might tackle this, generally.
Folks could make a custom Linux distro that pre-configures each app to be Mac like. I think that's the best chance. But jeeze it seems like an unholy crusade to support a very specific niche, a niche not known for participating & giving back & relishing what we are & do. Awfully big bridge to build & it will forever have some rickety-ness to it.
You could use something like https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools to read certain Mac key-combos or what not and rewrite them. But what would you rewrite to? I don't have a good sheet of what it is you'd be asking for or wanting to just work.
My spitball idea for how we'd really fix this: I'd like each app to register with a dbus service all of the "actions"/commands it can do, and allow rebinding & activation of the actions over dbus. Maybe even actions actually are just dbus methods, but annotated somehow, to describe their hotkeys or to give them human friendly names? Anyhow, whatever the impl, there could be a central "hotkey manager" that could see all keyboard bindings & let us top-down manage them. There'd need to be some way for "Save" in Kate to be combined/grouped together with "Save" in Firefox, somehow, for this to be helpful. Managing this namespace of actions would be a terror of a problem, utterly absurd, in my view, which implies strongly the difficulty of the ask here I'm trying to respond to, but I actually think it'd be a pretty noble & cool effort. In part because of what it relates to:
System command apps. Tools like dmenu/alfred/albert/quicksilver are meant as general top down interfaces, are often scriptable/extensible/deeply configurable to allow fast access & control of a variety of actions. By recognizing keybindings as what they are: actions/commands, and suggesting that the "actions"/commands of an app get bubbled up to the system layer & get managed there, we just make these top-commanders more powerful. There's also an extreme parallel here to voice-agent systems, like Chrome Assistant, Alexa, Siri, where apps present actions & the system is in charge of taking user input and translating it into actuation; they too are directory systems of actions, rather than having each app in isolation.
> ability to copy and paste into or out of a terminal without fuss
Copy/paste just works for me? Not sure what the problem statement is here, and/or what terminals you've suffered under.
> Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics.
100%. My main personal laptop is 4GB. I run sway which is low resource consumption, but in general resource consumption seems like a huge non-factor to me. In general, Linux isn't going to win by being more conservative. Pining about resource consumption is self-rewarding, self-gratifying: one feels zealous & virtuous, like you have the true cause amid a fallen world & are the path of the defender. But IMO it's mostly detracting & abusing the good & necessary & vital suffusion of creativity & possibility into the world. The scope of consumption is not that bad. And we have the important task of figuring out where to go still ahead of us: I'd rather be conservative once we have better ideas of what works, at any resource budget, & hone back down from there. Rather than forever dance around this maxima/minima we're on & tune for what we have.
I'm also unimpressed with this article in general. Showing the amount of memory mapped in seems incredibly uninteresting & indicative of nothing. Amount of data read has some correlation with start time but loosely: if Gnome is reading 1GB sequential (it's not but for example) while KDE is 512b reads randomly (it's not) but half the size, you'd probably still want to pick Gnome.
Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. A unified clipboard (kb shortcuts as well as shared buffer), proper 4k rendering/scaling at a nuclear level, etc. This is my biggest gripe with Linux.
I would ditch macOS entirely if I could do the following: 1. complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere (there are hacks for this, but they are hacks), 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) with consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications, 3. the ability to copy and paste text into or out of a terminal without fuss.
I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.
All this considered - and I can't believe I am about to say this - Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be and I kinda like it. Might need to go see a doctor I am starting to say funny things.